


from planar legacies

by fensandmarshes



Category: Dream SMP (Video Blogging RPF)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eret and Niki | Nihachu are siblings, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Minor canon divergence, Multiple Pronouns for Eret (Video Blogging RPF), Neopronouns for Eret (Video Blogging RPF), Platonic Cuddling, Pre-Canon, if something seems off about the timelines: no it doesn't ♥, tfw u haven't seen ur elder sibling in a few years but also ur developing herobrine eyes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29412729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fensandmarshes/pseuds/fensandmarshes
Summary: Niki has had a headache all morning.It’s nothing to worry about, really - there is probably a crook in her neck from sleeping strangely - but it’s enough to bother her occasionally, and she pauses to rub her temples. When she blinks open her eyes again, the world seems to flare in brief technicolour - like there are numbers written in the sky, coordinates embedded in every blade of grass under her feet - before it steadies, and she sways on her feet.Niki hasn't seen her sibling's eyes in years. This is the night she learns why.
Relationships: Eret & Niki | Nihachu, No Romantic Relationship(s)
Comments: 28
Kudos: 108





	from planar legacies

**Author's Note:**

> \- i have [a thread on twitter expanding on my boundaries wrt my rpf fics](https://twitter.com/fensandmarshes/status/1358885966878920704), but suffice it to say: this is a dsmp!verse fic, and i don't care about it being shared anywhere! all characterisations are based 100% off of the roleplay characters rather than the irl ccs.  
> \- thank you to [lieyuu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lieyuu) for the quick beta job and for vibing with me while i wrangled the posting form for this one 🥺 ily  
> \- anyway you can all thank the five day lockdown for this fic. im lonely. please i just want a hug so bad.

Niki has had a headache all morning.

It’s nothing to worry about, really - there is probably a crook in her neck from sleeping strangely - but it’s enough to bother her occasionally, and she pauses halfway through cutting down a tree to set down her axe and rub her temples. She’s gathering wood for a house - has just joined this little server with her friend Wil and a bunch of his friends. Her sibling is here, too. She’s staying with faer until she finishes her own starter base. But it’s still a new world, one where there are unfelled forests at spawn and untouched wrecks at the bottom of the ocean, and so she has a little gathering to do, just slowly, at her own pace. Eret can spare a room in faer house, but fae can’t spare enough resources for Niki to build her own.

It would be going a lot faster if she didn’t have to stop every five minutes, she thinks a little despairingly, and closes her eyes for a moment to rub at them.

She’s tired. 

When she blinks open her eyes again, the world seems to flare in brief technicolour - like there are numbers written in the sky, coordinates embedded in every blade of grass under her feet - before it steadies, and she sways on her feet. She must be worse off than she thinks. Maybe it’s time she heads back and calls it a day.

When she gets home, Eret is sitting in a chair grinning at a letter. Xe closes it when xe sees her, but xyr smile doesn’t disappear - if anything, it widens. Tired as she is, she still manages to muster a smile in return. She loves her sibling very dearly. Xe has been busy with this new server, and she has missed xem.

“Niki!” xe says, looking for all the world like a very excited golden retriever. “You’re back early!”

“I’m just feeling a little tired,” Niki admits, and shrugs. She closes the door behind her and heads to a chest to begin unloading the wood she has gathered. “How is your day going?”

“I’m just vibing,” xe says. Xe chuckles. “Wilbur sent me some message about a drug van. I dunno why he bothered to use paper.”

She hums. “For the aesthetic, probably.”

Eret chuckles, low in xyr chest. Niki is just about to turn and smile back at xem when her head throbs, and she winces, raising a hand to her temple. Her sibling is by her side with startling speed, worried.

“Niki,” xe says, like a mother hen. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” she murmurs. Lets herself lean against xyr side, regardless. “I just have a headache.”

She can feel Eret’s intake of breath, hear the way it rasps in xyr chest, and turns to look at them in baffled curiosity. “What?”

“... Nothing,” xe says. It would be convincing if she had not grown up with xem - if xe was not her sibling - and even though she cannot see xyr eyes because of those sunglasses xe started wearing at nineteen and hasn’t taken off since, and even though xe will not look directly at her, she can tell xe is lying to her.

“Eret,” she says reproachfully. “What is it, really?”

“I. Uh. Give me a few days,” Eret says, still not looking at her, “and then I promise I’ll explain everything.”

“Well that’s not ominous at all,” Niki says lightly. Unease trembles in her stomach, but she fights to shrug it away.

That night, she dreams.

Dreams of a world full of colour and light and layers, a world she can see the full truth of and thus slip in and out of like an apparition. A world that is a maze she knows how to navigate; worlds layered on worlds, separated only by code and characters and the seed from which their first oceans sprung. She dreams that every world is a fractal refraction of a plane upon which she stands, one that is void-white, and endless, and full of unforgiving primordial light.

She dreams of players - even in the dream corrects herself, amused,  _ people, not players _ \- people with the light in their eyes and the world’s truth in their sight, travelling the world, worlds, shifting sideways - doing their best to right a legacy made wrong.

Forests stripped of their leaves. Tunnels in which gravity shifted and the walls were unnaturally square, carved from stone and earth by no mortal hands. Homes stripped of their safety. A figure, always watching.

A line of descendants, always watching, always guarding. Some of them hide their eyes. Others bare them, unabashed and proud, and pay the price that results.

When she wakes, there is a buzzing in her ears, and her headache has returned. She blinks hard to clear the floaters from her vision -  _ numbers, colours, truth, _ she thinks, and laughs at herself, at the stolen holdovers of her dream - and slips out of her bed. The land outside is lit enough by torches that it should be safe to sit on the front porch; maybe she can watch the stars for just a little.

Niki is sitting on the steps just outside the door, periodically rubbing her eyes to clear the sleepy blur from them, when something flashes in the corner of her vision and she turns like a whip, half-convinced a creeper has set itself alight. There’s nothing there - only the door behind her - but a second later, it opens, and Eret looks down at her with an expression somewhere between fond and tightly composed.

“Hi,” she says, looking up at pyx. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither,” py admits.

Something about py seems off, but Niki can’t put her finger on it, so she only shuffles aside and pats the empty half of the stairs. “We can sit together,” she suggests. “Watch the stars.”

“How poetic,” Eret says, and Niki smiles gently up at pyx.

Py settles down next to Niki, and bumps their shoulders together companionably. It’s the middle of the night, but py’s still wearing pyxis sunglasses. Everything about pyx seems tightly wound, like a string pulled all the way taut; Niki notes that py’s still wearing the same jeans from earlier, and wonders if pyx even went to bed in the first place. Somehow, she doubts it.

“You can talk to me about it, you know,” she says, quietly. “You don’t have to, but if you wanted to. I’ll always listen.”

“I’ll have time enough to tell you,” Eret says - murmurs, pyxis voice low and husky. Like a secret. “In a few more days. Or maybe tonight. I don’t know how long it will take.”

She frowns, and then tries to smooth out her expression for Eret’s sake. “So there is something?”

“It’s important,” py admits. “I just - don’t think you would believe me, unless the time was right.”

“Eret, you’re scaring me.”

“The time has to be right,” py insists, strained. “I’ve  _ seen _ it.”

Niki thinks of her dream - of seeing too much, of watching, of glowing eyes - and shivers. When Eret gets like this, not much can shift pyx from pyxis intent. Instead, like water in a stream, she diverts her course. “You should at least change into pyjamas,” she offers softly. “Eret, you’re still wearing the same sunglasses from earlier. Did you notice?”

She feels py stiffen against her. “Yeah,” py says. “I noticed.”

“Why don’t you -”

“I’ll tell you later,” Eret says firmly, somehow both insistent and crushingly melancholy, and py gets to pyxis feet. Niki watches, concerned, as py heads back into the house.

The moment the door closes, the night chill hits Niki that much harder. She hunches into herself, and tries not to think about glowing eyes.

The night passes slowly. She heads back inside, into the little room she’s calling hers until she can build her own cottage, and tries for sleep. Her headache worsens; no one on a server this young will have painkillers, though. There is no ringing in her ears, but her eyes sting to the End and back. Rubbing them does nothing. Running water over them does nothing. She is pacing her room, trying to distract herself, when there is a searing flash of light that sends her stumbling to the floor.

She falls to her knees, in the center of the room, and shuts her eyes tightly. The light brightens, worsens - she thinks, giddy,  _ an endless plane, x axis, y axis, z axis, so many worlds laid upon this one vastness  _ \- and, caught into foolishness, she opens one eye just a little. Just a peek; just enough to let the light in.

And then everything is too much, and she makes a strangled cry somewhere between a sob and a whimper and she tries to focus on her knees and hands on the unsmoothed cobblestone floor but all she can think is  _ light, light, _ and part of her wonders if this is dying. If lightning has torn through the roof of her sibling’s house just to strike her. She sees too much and yet not enough - knows, somehow, that there is always more to see -

The light dies, but nothing is  _ less. _ The room is in technicolour. The cobblestone under her fingers glares back at her -  _ minecraft:cobblestone facing:west (towards negative x) biome:minecraft:woodedhills 1.16.4,  _ numbers and letters and she wrenches away from it with a gasp, turns to the window - sees  _ time:almost morning server light:12  _ \- screws her eyes shut but the damage is done, her mind is reeling, everything is too much and she takes heaving breaths, tries to force herself to be calm, to think, to process. To be clever - Eret would say that, when they were much younger.  _ Clever Niki. _ She’d call em  _ Silly Eret _ in return.

There are footsteps. There is a hand on her back, rubbing soothing circles. There is a low, hushed voice. She thinks, half gone mad,  _ Silly Eret. _

“Eret,” she whispers.

“I’m sorry,” ee murmurs into her hair, tugs her close.

She forces herself to breathe; her eyes are still tightly closed. “Eret,” she repeats, voice hoarse, “I - there’s so much, my eyes -”  _ don’t hurt any more, aren’t hiding any more _ \- “are doing something strange -”

“I know,” Eret agrees, voice so quiet it’s just a rumble in eir chest. “Hey, hey - Niki?”

“Eret -”

“Niki, I’m going to ask you to do something,” ee murmurs, still hushed. “Just for a little bit, and then we can make it go away for a while. Okay?”

“Okay,” she whispers; she feels very young, and it’s easy to trust Eret now, her big sibling, who knew everything about the world when they were nine and six years old.

“Look at me,” Eret says. “Just for a little.”

She draws away from em, still shuddering, and opens her eyes.

Images surge at her like soldiers with bared weapons - an aura of violet - something real, something human - images like little snapshots of Eret’s day, the letter from Wilbur, the sprawling night, Niki herself in the third person - the gentle rueful understanding nesting in Eret’s chest - and through it all Eret is looking back at her, smiling a little crookedly. Ee is not wearing eir glasses, she realises, and it makes something clutch tightly in her throat - instead, eir eyes are -

_ Blank, white, white but not blank, full of impossible, primordial light - _

are glowing, like she saw in her dream. She sucks in a startled breath. But around the eyes is a face she knows well, and her sibling is smiling at her, and - the lightest brush of fingers at her temples -

Ee is sliding eir glasses onto her face, and they don’t quite fit but they’re dark and comfortable and the light hurts less.

She can think, suddenly.

Can breathe.

Niki loosens her fingers from where they’re tangled in Eret’s sleeve - she was clutching eir wrist in a vice grip like a lifeline - and blinks hard. There are still numbers and letters, everywhere, all around - she thinks  _ planes layered on planes, _ and wonders if she could see other worlds - but like this, through dark glasses, they are manageable. Eret is still glowing violet - she looks at em a moment too long and suddenly is looking back at herself, crouched on the ground looking like a fool in opaque sunglasses too big for her face - but the images come slower. Eir eyes are still glowing.

“Eret -”

“We had an ancestor,” Eret says, still in that low tone like ee’s talking to a frightened animal. “He did bad things - terrified people - we, his descendants, are cursed with sight.”

“Cursed -?”

“Some say blessed,” Eret allows. Eir mouth twists wryly. “You were on the floor, crying, less than a minute ago.”

“I wasn’t -” Niki raises a hand to her own face, and finds tear tracks there. “Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“How do you know all this,” Niki says. She thinks she knows.

Eret smiles. “I saw it.”

“Are my eyes -” Niki cuts herself off, trying to find a kind way to say  _ blank, like yours - glowing with a light of that blank place that scares me beyond belief, beyond my body _ \- “ah, white?”

Eret lowers eir gaze, unnervingly pale. “Yes.”

“Should I hide them?”

“If you want.” Eret shrugs. “I like to. You don’t have to, but it makes things easier.”

“Easier to look at?”

“Easier to get along with people.” Eret stands, and offers Niki a hand up; she is reminded forcibly that ee stole  _ all  _ their family’s height genetics, which is incredibly rude. Nevertheless, she takes it. “Mostly people just find them creepy. They remind them of, uh - our ancestor. I don’t want to say his name.”

Something clicks into place and Niki sways on her feet, placing a hand over her mouth. When she doesn’t feel like vomiting any more, she says faintly, “You’re joking.”

“I did say we were cursed.”

“But  _ Hero  _ -”

“Sh,” Eret interrupts, uncharacteristically sharp, and Niki cuts herself forcibly off.

Nausea roils in her stomach, and she has to remind herself to breathe again; it is difficult, but she manages. She is real, and human. Mostly. Apparently. Eret places a hand on her shoulder and she turns to look at em; eir sunglasses nearly slip off her face, but ee places a finger on the bridge of her nose before they can, and gently pushes them back into place.

She snorts. Ee grins down at her. “Come outside,” ee says. “I think it might help to show you something.”

As ee leads her through the house, something occurs to her. “If I’m wearing your glasses,” she says, “does that mean you - I mean, are you okay with it?”

“Yeah, I’ll be alright,” Eret says. Ee holds the front door open for her. “It takes practice.”

Niki steps outside, pauses, and then freezes in place. The world unfurls before her. There are numbers written on the grass, and ticking clocks in the sky, and everything is  _ working, _ like a perfect construction, something beautiful built from nothing. The colours are brighter than she’s ever seen, even through Eret’s glasses. In the horizon, through the trees, there is a sunrise - it arrests her with its majesty.

“Oh,” she breathes, stunned.

When Eret speaks, she can hear the smile in eir voice. “Yeah,” ee murmurs, and steps out onto the front step to stand next to her.

“Eret, this is - so beautiful.”

“Wait until you can stand to see it without glasses.”

“You said this was a curse,” she accuses.

Ee chuckles. “Well, it doesn’t always have to be,” ee admits, and then, quiet, contemplative, “It is what we make it. It’s just our eyes, after all.”

Niki is tired, and still a little panicked, but her headache is gone and she supposes she will be able to sleep at last; she stands shoulder-to-shoulder with her sibling and thinks,  _ I will make it something beautiful. _

“It is,” she agrees, and refuses to believe that any of this is a curse.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!! consider leaving me a comment, if you will?
> 
> i really hope i've used the neopronoun sets correctly!! i know there are several similar variations - for example, some people use xe/xem/xyr while others use xe/xem/xeir - so if it's a different spelling then i'm pretty sure it was deliberate, but if i've muddled up the subject and object or something, please let me know!! the sets used are fae/faer, xe/xem, py/pyx and ee/em :D


End file.
